John Walker's Fourmilab Change Log

Sunday, October 28, 2007

Books On-line: King James and Latin Vulgate Bible Web Trees Updated

The verse-level linkable King James Version English and Latin Vulgate Bibles were among the first documents posted at Fourmilab, in December 1994 and January 1997 respectively. Times change, and while Scripture doesn't (but see below), Web standards move on, and the original HTML 1.0 documents were looking a tad aged to twenty-first century eyes. I've just posted a complete overhaul of both Web trees, with all documents now compliant with XHTML 1.0 (Strict DTD), using CSS 2.1 for presentation. Formatting and typography have been revised, and are now consistent with Fourmilab's site-wide style sheet.

The update is 100% compatible with existing “deep links” to chapters and verses. For example, here is a link directly to the “writing on the wall” in English and Latin. Speaking of the book of Daniel, I discovered that the Latin Vulgate I had posted was, like many other online editions, truncated after
Dan. 3:23. I replaced this book with a new version produced from the Project Gutenberg E-text of the Michael Hetzenauer edition. I have removed the material from chapter 3 (verses 3:24–3:90 in the Gutenberg text), which does not appear in the canonical Hebrew Bible, as well as the apocryphal chapters 13 and 14, which St. Jerome excluded from the Vulgate for the same reason.

The English, Latin, and Hebrew Bibles are now completely cross-linked at the book level: each book in a given language provides links to the other two languages at the bottom of the document. In addition, although the Hebrew Bible has not yet been updated to XHTML 1.0, a little JavaScript glue now allows you to deep-link directly to chapters and verses while preserving the frame-based navigation of that document. For example, the link: